Saturday, 21 March 2015

How George Bush and Tony Blair stole feminism to justify imperialist war on Iraq By Katherine Viner

Katherine Viner 21 March 2015.

KATHERINE Viner was appointed the new editor of The Guardian
newspaper on 20 March 2014. In September 2002, as George Bush and Tony
Blair were using every means they could find -- or invent -- to justify a
war on Iraq, she wrote this article about the attempt to use feminism
as a weapon of imperialist warmongering.
"Respect for women... can triumph in the Middle East and beyond!"
trilled [George Bush] the leader of the free world to the UN last week
[September 2002]. "The repression of women [is] everywhere and always
wrong!" he told the New York Times, warming to his theme that the west
should attack Iraq for the sake of its women.

Just as he bombed Afghanistan to liberate the women from their burkas
(or, as he would have it, to free the "women of cover"), and sent out
his wife Laura to tell how Afghans are tortured for wearing nail
varnish, so now Bush has taken on the previously-unknown cause of Iraqi
women - actually, look at the quotes, it's women everywhere! - to
justify another war.

Where next? China because of its anti-girl one-child policy? India
because of widow-burning outrages? Britain because of its criminally low
rape conviction rate?
At home, Bush is no feminist. On his very first day in the Oval
office, he cut off funding to any international family-planning
organisations which offer abortion services or counselling (likely to
cost the lives of thousands of women and children); this year he renamed
January 22 - the anniversary of Roe vs Wade which permitted abortion on
demand - as National Sanctity of Human Life Day and compared abortion
to terrorism: "On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this
world, and that it does not value life... Now we are engaged in a fight
against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life."

However, this theft of feminist rhetoric is not new, particularly if
its function is national expansion; in fact, it has a startling parallel
with another generation of men who similarly cared little for the
liberation of women.

The Victorian male establishment, which led the great imperialistic
ventures of the 19th century, fought bitterly against women's
increasingly vocal feminist demands and occasional successes (a handful
going to university; new laws permitting married women to own property);
but at the same time, across the globe, they used the language of
feminism to acquire the booty of the colonies.
The classic example of such a coloniser was Lord Cromer, British
consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, as described in Leila Ahmed's
seminal Women and Gender in Islam. Cromer was convinced of the
inferiority of Islamic religion and society, and had many critical
things to say on the "mind of the Oriental".

But his condemnation was most thunderous on the subject of how Islam
treated women. It was Islam's degradation of women, its insistence on
veiling and seclusion, which was the "fatal obstacle" to the Egyptian's
"attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should
accompany the introduction of Western civilisation," he said. The
Egyptians should be "persuaded or forced" to become "civilised" by
disposing of the veil.

And what did this forward-thinking, feminist-sounding veil-burner do
when he got home to Britain? He founded and presided over the Men's
League for Opposing Women's Suffrage, which tried, by any means
possible, to stop women getting the vote.

Colonial patriarchs like Cromer believed that middle-class Victorian
mores represented the pinnacle of civilisation, and set about
implementing this model wherever they went - with women in their
rightful, subservient place, of course. They wanted merely to replace
eastern misogyny with western misogyny. But, like Bush, they stole
feminist language in order to denounce the indigenous culture; and, says
Ahmed, feminism thus served as a "handmaid to colonialism". "Whether in
the hands of patriarchal men or feminists," she writes, "the ideas of
western feminism essentially functioned to morally justify the attack on
native societies and to support the notion of comprehensive superiority
of Europe."

The thieves of feminist language couldn't (and can't) even be
bothered to pretend that they actually care about women in the colonised
or bombed countries: in Egypt, Cromer actively ensured that women's
status was not improved: he raised school fees (so preventing girls'
education) and discouraged the training of women doctors.

And "feminist" George Bush has abandoned the women of Afghanistan:
where is his concern (or Laura's, or Tony Blair's, or Cherie Blair's,
who was also wheeled out by her husband) for the very many Afghan women
who live in fear of the marauding mojahedin who now run the country and
are in many ways as repressive as the Taliban?

Where were their protests when Sima Samar, Afghanistan's women's
affairs minister and one of only two women ministers in Hamid Karzai's
western-installed government, was forced from her job this summer
because of death threats?

This cooption of feminism without a care for the women on the ground
is not without consequences - although, predictably, it is not the
colonisers who suffer them.

Ahmed writes: "Colonialism's use of feminism to promote the culture
of the colonisers and undermine native culture has... imparted to
feminism in non-western societies the taint of having served as an
instrument of colonial domination, rendering it suspect in Arab eyes and
vulnerable to the charge of being an ally of colonial interests."

Indeed, many Muslim women are suspicious of western-style feminism
for this very reason, a fact which it is crucial for feminists in the
west to understand, before they do a Cromer and insist that the removal
of veils is the route to all liberation. The growing Islamicisation of
Arab societies and the neo-colonial impact of the war on terror has
meant that, according to academic Sherin Saadallah, "secular feminism
and feminism which mimics that of the west is in trouble in the Arab
world".
But just because Arab women are rejecting western-style feminism, it
doesn't mean they are embracing the subjugation of their sex. Muslim
women deplore misogyny just as western women do, and they know that
Islamic societies also oppress them; why wouldn't they? But liberation
for them does not encompass destroying their identity, religion or
culture, and many of them want to retain the veil.

Reflecting this, a particular brand of Muslim feminism has developed
in recent years which is neither westernised and secular nor Islamist
and ultra-traditional, but instead is trying to dismantle the things
which enforce women's subjugation within the Islamic framework.
Increasingly relevant and influential, Leila Ahmed and Fatima Mernissi
are the most significant theoretical voices.
And in the west, feminists are left with the fact that their own
beliefs are being trotted out by world leaders in the name of a cause
which does nothing for the women it pretends to protect. This is nothing
less than an abuse of feminism, one which will further discredit the
cause of western feminism in the Arab world, as well as here. When
George Bush mouths feminist slogans, it is feminism which loses its
power.

But such a theft is in the spirit of the times. Feminism is used for
everything these days, except the fight for true equality - to sell
trainers, to justify body mutiliations, to make women make porn, to help
men get off rape charges, to ensure women feel they have self-respect
because they use a self-esteem-enhancing brand of shampoo. No wonder
it's being used as a reason for bombing women and children too.